Food waste: Great tips on how to avoid it

When we set a budget, devise a meal plan, and shop for what we need, no matter how tight a ship you run, at the end of a week there will always be endy-bits. Recognise these small left-over bits as crucial to prudent meal planning, saving you money that can be put to another use.

Often, retailers and other food businesses, such as restaurants, have food left at the end of the day. We will look at an innovative food app that helps food business find a market for their would-be-waste while you get great food at a super low price – and get a night off from the kitchen. That’s a win-win!

There are some quick, easy, and low-cost preserving techniques. These come into their own for making something more from bargain bin items. Where seasonal vegetables are on special offer, knowing what can be done with them allows you to take advantage in a big way.

Food Banks

Before we go any further, a few words on food banks. Food banks are a service that, in an ideal world, shouldn’t ever exist. But they do, and unfortunately reliance on their service is increasing.

For some, they make a choice between eating and doing something else: to eat or heat. It’s an astonishing state of affairs that makes me profoundly uneasy and sad. But, as essential as they are, too often food bank food lacks basic nutrition.

Food isn’t just about delivering calorific energy, our bodies need more than that: protein, fibre, vitamins, minerals.

I would love to see more fresh foods donated to food banks, but I also recognise that, in the UK, food banks have stopped stocking potatoes as people can’t afford the energy to cook them.

Irrespective, food banks should not be a dumping ground for unhealthy food: fresh potatoes over cheap frozen pizza, not the other way round.

Fridge Raiding

I admit, there are days when I look at my perfectly penned weekly menu and decide today is not the day for that thing I thought I should cook. Instead, this is a good day for raiding the fridge (and the freezer and presses) and rustling up something new, exciting, and heretofore unknown from remnants, endy-bits, and that sad looking scallion.

Fridge raiding can feel like an adventure of Indiana Jones proportions. I love it!

Half a red pepper, that lank-looking scallion, a couple of eggs, a tin of tomatoes, a dribble of natural yogurt and a tiny piece of cheddar? Eggs in Purgatory!

Half a bag of frozen peas and some leftover curry paste? Pea Curry!

A tin of mackerel and left-over mash? Fish cakes!

A leek and two large and sprouting potatoes? Soup!

Half a tin of chickpeas, a bit of lemon and some parsley that’s about to go over? Chickpea dip!

You get the picture. You might not always be able to guarantee what it’s going to taste like, but as they say, it’s not the destination but the journey!

Having a decent store of spices is a great way to elevate any dish. Forget expensive small glass jars and seek out your local Asian supermarket for large packets of spices at a fraction of the price. Buy one here and there as budget permits, and before you know it, you’ll have a library of spices.

Lovely Leftovers

OK, I’ll say it one more time before I leave well alone: leftovers are brilliant and food waste is money in the bin!

Fill tortillas with leftover chilli. Strip what remains from a roast chicken and use in a risotto, curry, stir fry, or pasta dish.

Odd bits of salad vegetables can be brought together and topped with tinned fish for a nutritious meal.

Make a fondue from weird bits of random cheese, and baton that half a carrot for dipping… Everything that was something first can be made into something anew.

Simple Preserves

Preserving food is a sure-fire way to stretch the budget and, if you’ve picked up something from a bargain bin or bulked up on special offer veggies, knowing some basic preserving methods will be the difference between making use of your special buy or throwing it in the bin – and you know how I feel about that!

Freezing: If you have a freezer, make use of it by storing vegetables and fruits that freeze well. Carrots, parsnips, green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, cabbage, brussels sprouts – these are all vegetables that freeze well.

Peel and prep and blanch for 1 minute in salted boiling water, drain, bag, cool and put in the freezer.

You can make up bags of mixed vegetables too for soup, ratatouille, or stir fry mix.

Chop onions, bag, and freeze. Job lot of tomatoes? Cook down and portion for a pasta sauce base.

Soft fruits often turn up in the bargain bin: cherries, strawberries, blueberries, pineapple, bananas. All will freeze well, just remember to destone cherries, hull strawberries, and peel and slice bananas first!

Frozen fruits are perfect for adding to smoothies, breakfast granola toppings, or cooked into sweet pies.

Bread rolls, seasonal breads and some cakes can also be stored in the freezer, as can cream, yogurt, milk, butter, and some cheeses (cheddar is perfect grated and bagged).

Drying: Tie bunches of bargain bin fresh herbs together and hang somewhere dry and with good air flow. It costs nothing, takes a few days, and when brittle-dry store in glass jars.

Dried herbs have more intense flavour than fresh and can be cooked in sauces, etc, for a long time to impart flavour.

If you have a few odd bits of bread that aren’t fresh enough to eat any more, leave out overnight to turn fully stale then blitz in a food processor to make breadcrumbs. Leave them naked, or flavour with herbs, bag up and pop in the freezer. You can cook breadcrumbs straight from frozen, so take only what you need when you need it.

Pickling: Table salt, white sugar and white vinegar are among some of the cheapest of staples you can buy in bulk, and you need all three if you want to pickle things! Sugar or salt based, everything else then is a bonus: mustard, fennel, and cumin seeds, black peppercorns and bay leaves are all great in pickling liquor.

Radish, cucumber, fennel, white cabbage, cauliflower, and onion pickles are all wonderful for making the most of bulk buy veggies and, after mellowing for a month on a shady shelf somewhere, add a mouth-puckeringly delicious crunch to lunch plates, salads, and sandwiches.

Too Good To Go – Surprise Bags

Too Good To Go is an app-based service that connects food service retailers, cafes and restaurants in Cork city and county with customers who are looking for a dual solution that addresses food waste and provides great food at a third of the usual retail price.

Too Good To Go launched in Cork city at the end of March; the third location after Dublin and Galway. At the end of a day, food retailers may have food left over or unsold. Rather than throw it in the bin – which represent a cost to the business – they advertise the food via the Too Good To Go app as “Surprise Bags” at a third of the original price.

Customers download the free app and check out which vendors nearby have Surprise Bags available, select, pay online via the app, and collect to take away with you. There are already 57 food businesses listed on Too Good To Go and more are being added.

From small neighbourhood cafes, to bakeries, delis, restaurants, and more besides, Surprise Bags start at just €3.99 with many at this price point or below €5.99. You won’t know exactly what’s in it until you collect, so choose wisely – you may not have a need for four loaves of sourdough! But be smart, and you could have dinner sorted from two or three businesses a short walk from each other for less than €10!

The founders of Too Good To Go are passionate about this venture and operate to a high ethical standard. Honest, good food is at the core of this service.

As co-founder Jamie Crummie says: "It's fantastic to see so many businesses, as well as consumers eager to join our food waste movement and we've been blown away by the response to Too Good To Go by the community - we've even had businesses amazed to see food being rescued just moments after listing their Surprise Bags on the app! I'm incredibly excited to see our continued impact in Cork as we continue to fight food waste and pave the way for a brighter, greener future."

RECIPES

My three recipes this week aim to change perspective of food as would-be-waste to food too-good-to-waste!

Veg Trimming Stock 

A very good chef friend of mine introduced me to this simply brilliant idea.

Take a large resealable freezer bag. Every time you peel or trim a vegetable, instead of throwing the trimmings in the bin (or compost bin), put them into the freezer bag, seal, and store in the freezer. Keep topping it up until you have filled up the bag with enough to make a decent stock.

Onion skins, carrot tops and peelings, potato peelings, celery off cuts, tomato trimmings, bits of herbs, lemon halves, garlic skins, leek tops – any bit of uncooked vegetable that would be thrown away goes into the trimmings bag!

Empty the contents into a stock pot or large deep saucepan with enough water to cover, boil for an hour, or, if you have a slow cooker put everything in and cover with water and cook on low overnight. Strain, keeping the stock liquid and portion into bags of 1 litre of stock and return to the freezer.

Use this stock to make soups, sauces, and gravy’s; cook rice and paste in it for extra flavour, or as the basis for stews, or slow-cooker dishes too.

Many Ways with One Chicken

Back in lockdown one, I challenged myself to see how many meals I could make from one whole chicken. (Check it out on EchoLive.ie) I made 14 plates of food for my husband. Obviously, the large the family the less variety of dishes you will get from one chicken, but you should still be able to get enough for more than one meal. If nothing else, the carcass can be used to make chicken stock which will form the basis of another meal itself.

I tend to start with roasting the chicken whole. The breast meat will do for at least one meal. The legs and wings another. 

Then comes the business of picking every last bit from the bones – including from the back of the chicken – this can be put to use at Chicken Noodle Soup, a salad, sandwich, a risotto or in a pasta dish. It may even be enough to get two meals from!

A single large chicken should be able to provide enough food for up to five meals for a family of four; more if a couple or on your own.

Tuna Plait 

I always keep frozen puff pastry in the freezer which usually comes as two rolls in a box, so there is often one left in the freezer. I use it because a) life is too short for making your own puff pastry, and b) ready to use pastry is super versatile.

My mum used to make Tuna Plait, a fancy-looking tuna sausage roll. 

Two tins of tuna, drained, are added to a finely chopped red pepper, a couple of finely chopped scallions, some diced pickled gherkin, lemon zest and a little juice and seasoned with salt and pepper. This mix is placed off-centre on the sheet of puff pastry, and either rolled or plaited – if you have the patience – and sealed and painted over with an egg or milk wash. You can add a sprinkle of sesame seeds if you like, then bake in the oven until the pastry is golden and puffed up, about 20 minutes.

Serve this will a large leafy salad, some bread, and a dollop of mayonnaise on the side. Delicious!

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I hope you have found these tips and hints useful and inspiring. I really am passionate about advocating for those on tight food budgets to access good, nutritious food.

StopFoodWaste.ie have some great resources for people looking to reduce food waste and goes hand in hand with making food budgets stretch.

If you have a little spare time at evenings or weekends, seek out a local community garden. Participation comes with a free outlet for socialising, and a great education for kids. Participants usually get a share in the harvest, too: free food in exchange for a bit of your time and labour. Sounds like a great deal to me!